Memoir of the Sunday Brunch

by Julia Pandl

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s new.”

  “He’s new, brand new, like today’s his first day?”

  “Yep.”

  “Poor guy.” Honestly, despite the fact that he was at least three years older than me, I wanted to cry for the kid.

  “He just came up to me and asked, ‘Who’s that big fat guy running around yelling at everyone?’ ”

  Larry and I stood there, both of us clutching the drain under the coffee spigots, doubled over laughing.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said, ‘Ah, that big fat guy is Mr. Pandl, and he’s the one who signs your paycheck.’ Then he asked me not to tell.”

  It happened all the time. Kids slid through the interview process because they owned a pair of black pants and could breathe. They arrived at work their first day thinking, Easy cash, how hard can it be to bus tables?

  Then they ran into George. He worked alongside everyone else, so it was easy to mistake him for a line cook or a dishwasher. There was no formal let’s-do-lunch introduction. Instead, my father would do things like toss a five-dollar bill underneath a pile of lettuce he’d found lying on the floor outside the second walk-in and watch bus kids walk back and forth, lugging bundles of tablecloths and napkins up the stairs, stepping over, and sometimes directly on, the greens. He waited, busying himself, counting the number of times each person ignored the mess until his level of frustration threatened to produce cardiac arrest, and then he stopped the unlucky new kid, grabbing him or her by the arm. Lifting the lettuce leaves and pointing to the cash, he then exclaimed, “Look here!”

  “Cool,” was the standard response. Easy cash, right?

  “COOL? COOL? Who do you think put that there, Santa Claus?”

  “Umm . . .”

  “Do you know how many times you walked over this lettuce? Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Eighteen! Eighteen times. You’d be rich right now if you had bothered to bend over and clean it up. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, now you know. Next time, when you see a mess, clean it up.” Then he’d pick up the money, slip it back in his wallet, and walk away. Not exactly your standard welcome aboard, but it made an impression.

  Still laughing and wiping tears from my eyes, I went behind the dish machine to grab the plates. The machine belched heavy clouds of steam as it pushed the plates, lined up in plastic racks like soldiers marching into battle, toward the end of the conveyor. Each plate was delivered from the mouth of the dragon at a temperature of something like twenty thousand degrees. I held my breath and pulled them, two by two, and placed them in stacks where the racks stopped, wondering if the water temperature was hot enough to evaporate my fingerprints forever. When the stacks grew tall enough, I leaned a pile carefully against my chest, turned toward the dining room, and whimpered. Waiting for them to cool down was out of the question. Hot plates were literally a physical necessity when it came to keeping order in George’s world. Delivering cold plates might have been on par with strutting into the dining room naked, stopping at a table, and taking a bite out of somebody’s pancakes.

  I looked like an orangutan dragging a bowling ball by the time I made it out to the buffet, knees buckling and wobbly, knuckles sweeping along the carpeting, and face with a primatelike scowl. Naturally, a long line had formed.

  I cursed Hallmark.

  I cursed Mother’s Day.

  I cursed everything that went with it—the cards, the stores, the tchotchke stationery, the keepsake ornaments, and the Hall of Fame movies.

  The edges of the plates burned corduroy stripes into my forearms while pellets of sweat poured over my temples. I squatted down to give myself some leverage and heaved the swaying stack under the heat lamp.

  Just then, I heard my father stutter, “Get me . . . get . . . me . . . get me . . . the beans . . . the . . . beans without skin . . . skin.” I didn’t have to look. I could see by the way the customers gawked that his words were accompanied by a series of twitches and spasms. They all looked at me as if to say, “Does he need to be medicated or confined?” One woman in particular locked eyes with me for a split second; hers were cold and brilliantly blue, but her expression was soft. She was somebody’s mother. Somebody had picked the place, made the plans, and brought her there. She was celebrating.

  I knew what he meant. He needed more of the American fried potatoes, without skin. The green beans—with skin, of course—sat right next to the potatoes in the steam table. The crowd caused the two to become one in George’s mind. I understood, and I hoped she did too.

  I held her gaze and smiled. “I got it, Dad,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  8

  Rise and Shine

  In my memory, some days stick out like a sore thumb, others like an ax in the forehead. When my sister Katie turned thirty, I was sixteen. She had the unfortunate luck of being born on New Year’s Eve, a nice tax deduction for Terry and George, but her thunder was often dulled by the aftereffects of Christmas, or stolen altogether by the fact that it was a new year for everybody. For her thirtieth birthday, our friend Meg planned a surprise party at Echo Bowl for a date three weeks after the fact in January, hoping to throw Katie off the scent. Echo Bowl—a bowling alley–cum–tavern–cum–video arcade—wasn’t exactly “dinner at the Ritz,” but the place was as much a part of the landscape of our lives as it was a part of the landscape of Milwaukee, so it fit the bill.

  Because George and I were slated to work the brunch the next day, he and Terry and I had to hit four thirty Mass at St. Eugene’s that Saturday, and then head down Port Road to the bowling alley. Four thirty Mass, no matter where, was a little like a sedative for my father. The second reading pulled him under like clockwork. I sat between him and my mother and drove my elbow into his ribs whenever he drifted into a snore.

  “I’m thinking,” he said, his eyelids popping open as if he really were just thinking.

  “You’re snoring,” I whispered.

  “Really,” he said, in feigned surprise.

  “Yeah, really.”

  We arrived at Echo Bowl around six. From the outside, the place reminded me a little of the restaurant, but the settings were decidedly different. Pandl’s neighborhood was serene and orderly, whereas noisy fast-food chains and splashy car dealerships flanked Echo Bowl. Both buildings, however, had a crudely out-of-place steel arch that stretched like a sooty rainbow from one end to the other, leftovers from a puzzling architectural fad. The similarities ended there, though, thank God. Echo Bowl had a stale smell that burrowed into your jacket, your sweater, your jeans, and your hair. It stuck with you for days, like someone had stuffed a pack of beer-battered and deep-fried Pall Malls in your pocket or under your pillow.

  I steered my mother toward the stairs leading down to the private party room in the basement, past the bar, the shoe rental desk, and the arcade, while my father sauntered behind, soaking it all in. He had a silly smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He wasn’t a bowler—at least I’d never seen him do it—but something about the atmosphere appealed to him. Happy chatter cut through thick smoke in the bar, while beer from taps flowed steadily into eight-ounce pilsners. Rubber-soled red and white shoes—circle heel-stamps bearing the sizes—soft and moist from collective use, slipped back and forth across the Formica countertop in one queer yet welcome exchange after another. A symphony of jingles, blips, clanks, and twitters, along with a torrent of electric blue light, burst from the arcade. And underneath it all was the slow rumble of hard resin rolling down slick maple. The noisy, uncomplicated energy tickled my father’s twitch. He had a way of enjoying things exactly as they were. He loved local color, even if it came with carpeting that smelled like a St. Bernard that had been bathed in Budweiser.

  Katie got wise when her friends directed her down the basement stairs, but her face lit up with surprise nonetheless. Parties have a way of folding into each other over time. After a while, they all start t
o look the same—bunches of primary-colored balloons tied to sandbags in the center of paper tablecloths, a stray one floating here and there against a dropped ceiling; clear plastic cups filled with too much foam; gag gifts about being over the hill; a box of Depend; a pair of big beige granny panties, and a flurry of familiar faces all add up to thirty, or forty, and maybe fifty. When the gag gifts become functional, the parties take on a different shape.

  Katie’s party was no different, except that I was finally old enough to mingle with the adults. And because my parents were present, I was able to drink beer. The rules regarding drinking in our family were designed to establish what you might call a relaxed responsibility. Granted, the design had some serious flaws—nine of them, to be exact—but the intent, I believe, was earnest. When we were booster-seat small, my father served us tiny chasers of beer with dinners that included sauerkraut or red cabbage, stating that it was downright criminal to drink milk with such foods. As we grew older, we were allowed to have an occasional beer at family functions or while kibitzing around the kitchen table. Beer, incidentally, was okay; everything else was not. Supervision was the key, but by the time I came along, the lock had been picked a thousand times.

  I had my first full beer on a crisp September day in a bar in Munich when I was fourteen, a freshman in high school. A bunch of us had traveled to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with a group from the Wisconsin Restaurant Association. George ordered the beer for me. The server, who looked like she had just jumped off a bottle of St. Pauli Girl, dropped four gigantic steins of Paulaner Dunkel in the center of the table: one for George, one for Stevie, one for Amy, and one for me. With a practiced flick of his wrist, my father slid mine over through the splash of beer the waitress had left behind. My eyes bulged. “Dad, this is as big as my head,” I said. “There’s no way I can drink all this.”

  He smiled and said, “Just finish what you can,” and sank his upper lip into a thick white peak. He closed his eyes, took three long gulps, and pulled the stein away. “Ahh, it’s like coming home,” he declared, before licking the suds off his whiskers. His appreciation had always made beer look as if it could cure cancer, but that day it seemed heightened by the fact that he was sharing it among his people, past and present. Even I could sense that on this occasion it was more than just a beer. It was a slightly bitter but warm and malty rite of passage.

  The biggest flaw of my father’s relaxed-responsibility plan may have been me. By age sixteen I was, by definition, naughty and sneaky in an overt way unique to babies of the family. At Katie’s party I made fast friends with the bartender and proceeded to consume cup after cup of keg beer. Katie’s friends welcomed me into their conversations, and I managed to hold up my end, wandering in and out of duos and threesomes like a pro, sampling hors d’oeuvres and offering to run for drinks. Around nine George tapped me on the shoulder and said, “We’re leaving.”

  “Can I stay?”

  “Go ask the boss,” he said, deferring to Mom.

  My mother sat at a table nearby, chatting with Jeremiah. I slid next to them and asked her if I could stay.

  “I don’t think so, honey. You’ve got to work tomorrow, and how are you going to get out to the lake?”

  “Please, Mom,” I pleaded.

  Jeremiah interjected and gestured with his cup, “Just let her stay, Mom. I’m going out there tonight. She can come with me.”

  She put her hand on his arm, looked him in the eye, and said, “This is your baby sister.”

  “Mom, it’s fine. She’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  “All right, but don’t be too late.”

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT before our shoes crunched on the ice and snow as we made our way across the parking lot to Jeremiah’s light blue Omni. “You wanna go out?” he asked over the hood of the car.

  “Where?” I asked, dropping like a rag doll into the frozen bucket seat and rubbing my mittens together.

  “To a bar.”

  “Jere, I can’t get into a bar.” My breath produced a cloud that settled into the windshield.

  “This bar you can get into. Trust me.”

  Excited to be both under his wing and at his side, I trusted. We went to a bar called Smitty’s on Keefe Avenue, just off Humboldt. At the time it was a dicey neighborhood—not necessarily rape-and-murder dicey but not a bad place to buy a dime bag through the tinted window of a Gran Torino either. Had she known where he was taking me, Terry would have hit the roof. In the eighties, people went down there for two reasons: one, the bars tended to overlook underage drinking; two, Albanese’s, a tiny hole-in-the-wall on Keefe, had a garlic spinach pasta so good it was truly worth getting shot at.

  Honestly, I was cooked the minute he pulled the car out of the bowling alley parking lot. The quick right turn, the spring of the clutch, and the other cars moving in the opposite direction on Port Road all provided an undetected bit of foreshadowing and made my eyeballs turn in on my stomach. I felt a flash of pain and a mozzarella stick tried to throw itself up, but I locked my jaw around it and swallowed hard, determined not to wimp out on Jeremiah.

  I opened the car door into a dirty snowbank, stumbled over it, and followed him into Smitty’s. A heavy cloud of smoke settled in and around piles of crisply permed hair. The place was January—humid, a mixture of sweaty wool, bad breath, stale beer, and ancient radiators. I leaned into a bar stool draped with an abandoned black peacoat and a red wool scarf; its tassels lying in the gray slush on the floor.

  “Two Miller Lites, tap,” Jeremiah shouted over the dizzying whoosh of voices muddled with music.

  The bartender, John, was a friend of his. John wiped his hands on a clean white towel, slung it over his shoulder, looked over at me, smiled, and said, “How old’s your friend?”

  Jeremiah smiled back. “This is my sister. She’s twenty-two.”

  It was one of those moments, the kind where you realize you’re past the point of no return. The room seesawed and I knew I was in trouble. Jeremiah handed me my beer and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I hiccuped.

  “Sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay.” He turned around and headed toward a group of his friends seated at a table against the wall.

  I poked him in the back with my mitten and said, “I’ll be right back.” Hiccup.

  “Okay. I’ll be with these guys.” He gestured to a blur of pasty white Wisconsin winter faces.

  I side-winded my way toward the back of the bar, figuring there had to be a bathroom back there somewhere. I set my glass down next to a girl with too much black eyeliner and wearing gold earrings the size of salad plates, each of which offered a nauseatingly distorted reflection of my head, like I was looking at it in the side of a car door. I backed away, wobbled into the ladies’ room, and latched the door.

  Options tend to narrow at an alarming rate when you’re on the verge of throwing up. You have just a few terrifying seconds to look around and make choices about where you will and where you will not put your head and hands. Throwing up meant defeat; it meant that I could not keep up, what felt, at the time, like a fate worse than death, so I chose to lie on the floor, sandwiched between the toilet and the wall, with my cheek against the cold, wet tile and the bottoms of my Tretorns against the door. I’ll admit, not exactly an Audrey Hepburn moment, but what are you gonna do? A dark, rippled water line separated the top and bottom halves of the wood molding at the base of the wall. I found a soothing rhythm, breathing in and out over each tiny wave, broken every ten seconds by the rattle of the door against my heels. Finally, a loud voice from the other side cried, “What the fuck’s going on in there? C’mon, I gotta pee!”

  Worried about embarrassing—or worse, disappointing—my brother, I made a move to stand. I raised myself to my knees and rested my arms and head on the toilet seat. My shadow hovered for a few seconds in the tea-colored water, undulating along with the music. In one rubbery motion, I grabbed the seat with my mittens, pu
shed up, turned around, and undid the latch. Earring girl got tangled up in her white leather pirate boots and fell past me as I swung open the door. “Bitch,” she said, falling into the wall. I tried to see my reflection in her earrings. It crossed my mind to point to them and ask if her pimp knew that she had stolen his hubcaps, but instead I just made a beeline for the front door and stumbled to the car.

  Within a few minutes, Jeremiah knocked on the passenger’s-side window. “What’re you doing?”

  “Closing my eyes.”

  “You can’t just leave without telling me. I didn’t know where the hell you were.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t want you to be mad.”

  “I’m not mad. Jesus! Just don’t leave like that. We can go home.”

  “ ’Kay.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, the sound of my father’s voice was like a bag of goldfish swimming in my head. “Rise and shine,” he sang. “Daylight in the swamps.” His words made my brain wobble and threw me off balance, despite the fact that I remained motionless, frozen in the fetal position, like a dead person, wrapped in thick flannel sheets, waiting to be tossed into the trunk of a car.

  “C’mon, time to get up.”

  My eyeballs declared themselves painfully present within their throbbing orbs. I felt my eyelids separate and peel themselves slowly in the opposite direction over thick, buttery mucus.

  “I’m up,” I said, putting the screws to my gray matter.

  “We’re already running late. You’ve got twenty minutes.”

  “ ’Kay.”

  I heard his slippers sliding up the slate stairs in the foyer, and I closed my eyes. I had a feeling that just standing up was going to be a problem. The thought of working an entire brunch forced my dehydrated body to produce a couple of small, miraculous tears. As they squeezed themselves out of the corners of my eyes and slipped onto the sheets, I wondered if the day would actually kill me. Death was certainly near. I could smell him in the room; he hovered around my head, his presence a greasy cheeseburger served in a dirty shoe store ashtray. I thought perhaps it was just my breath until I sat up and he dropped his scythe cleanly down the center of my skull. If not for the fact that my skin was pulled tightly around my head, so much so that it made my hair hurt, I believe my cranium would have split into two neatly symmetrical bowls. I clutched two fistfuls of flannel, waiting for the shock to wear off or sink in, waiting for the room to right itself.